“Is that what you’re doing when you coerce someone into an economic contract that leverages their desperation against them?”
Coerce: Persuade (an unwilling person) to do something by using force or threats.
Only the government can coerce people as they’re the only ones who can legally kill you or incarcerate you. Company Stores were a product of a by-gone era and worthy of a separate discussion. Suffice it to say, company stores utilized an unfair advantage by monopolizing the local market. It was a unique condition, even for the time but is not at all representative of commerce as a whole.
Feudal Lords more aptly resemble today’s government than it does businessmen. Only government can seize your land and legally take what is rightfully yours (or your daughters). If that happened today it would be considered rape and theft (unless the government did it, then it’s called Eminent Domain or, simply, taxation).
As far as unions (et al) “balancing the scales”, that is a practice that better fits what you previously described as coercion. In a marketplace, nobody forces you to buy anything, but unions do force their employers to meet their demands otherwise they sabotage that business (if they’re not fired and replaced).
The big distinction between all of these scenarios is that the government achieves its aims through the threat of force, violence, incarceration or death. A free marketplace doesn’t operate that way. They offer a product or service and ask for a price. Pay it or don’t, you’re free either way. You, definitively, cannot be free while being threatened with force.
So you are more than able to buy into Marxist ideology, just understand that by doing so you are against freedom.
So what I got from this comment is, "It's impossible for corporations to be coercive/tyrannical because semantics." There's actually quite a few commenters on this article who have a really hard time understanding how employers manipulating desperate people to accept conditions they normally wouldn't could be coercive even though no threats of violence are used.
Actually, reading the comment again, it seems this person goes against their own argument part way through; corporations can't be coercive because they can't legally kill, but unions are coercive because . . . can they legally kill? So a union threatening a business unless certain conditions are met is coercive, but an employer having an employee accept a shit contract and unfair conditions because they know the know the job market is shit and that the employee knows they might not find other work isn't coercive?