In many legal systems, there are laws that disallow certain types of contracts, even if they are supposedly entered into voluntarily. Some things are considered bad enough to not allow. Coercion is hard to define, especially with power differentials as huge as you find between multinationals and small communities.
You can't just put any arbitrary restriction in a contract that you feel like, particularly not when the party imposing the restriction has the coercive power of government or quasi-governmental entities on its side.
The classic example of this is the old-school homeowner's association covenant that forbade selling your house to people of a certain race.
Many of them are unenforceable in the USA too. For contracts that are not negotiable (like EULA or TOS), and which one side has a lot more legal expertise than the other (e.g. corporation vs. random citizen), the restrictions on what is enforceable are significant.
Two corporations that sit down and hash out a mutual contract have much less restrictions though.
If you're forced to sign a contract and don't get to negotiate the terms, and it tries to do unusual things like that, it can be... pretty hard to enforce.
Have you heard of the power of legally enforceable contracts? Lots of things aren't technically impossible but are forbidden by the law or by a contract. It's one of the ways modern societies function, check it out!
Proving coercion or lack thereof is hard. If it wasn't everybody and their brother would weasel out of contracts unfavorable to them. Well, not everybody, but still, plenty of people would.
Consent under coercion which most work contracts are implicitly, else how are you going to pay for your living expenses, by necessity require government intervention.
Countries regularly legislate and regulate against various forms of unfair terms in contracts, ranging from the deceptive and absurd to fairly mundane things. You can’t enter into contracts requiring illegal behaviour for instance. This is true in the U.S. and all other countries that I’m aware of.
In the UK and other European countries, particularly regarding consumer goods or other kinds of contracts with an inherent asymmetry of negotiating power, there are lots of things you can’t agree in contracts, such as disclaiming general fitness for purpose and safety.
Deciding that you can’t agree away your rights to redress through the judicial system seems like a reasonable extension of these kinds of rules.
People should perhaps be free to create whatever informal contracts they want between themselves, but there is no "freedom" that entitles them to have their arbitrary contract enforced by the state.
When enforcing those contracts through coercion, the state denies the infringing party some freedom.
I think there are also some points brought up by Chapelle that deserve quantitative legal scrutiny.
Coercion can invalidate a contract. Also, contracts that are extremely one sided can be legally challenged or that require no consideration from one of the parties. Additionally, contracts based on false information can be invalidated.
If I'm starving and I sign a contract to pay all of my future earnings for a plate of food, no court is going to hold up that contract.
Obviously, the methods used by these big companies are a higher and more complex level of coercion. But I think they deserve some scrutiny in this regard.
Did I mention coercion? I mentioned unconscionability, which is a different legal concept. You ought to look it up, but it's basically tricking someone into signing a terrible deal so as to gain contractual leverage over them. The terribleness of the deal can often be obscured using deceptive accounting methods. Just because it was voluntary doesn't mean it was equitable; if the mining company is doing great and the people whose land is being mined are not doing similarly well, then clearly something about the deal is asymmetrical.
We must live in countries with wildly different legal systems. Here in the United States, contract law includes concepts like unenforceable clauses, duress, lack of capacity, etc. Many of those concepts are related to the concepts of fair/unethical, and have plenty of bearing on whether the contract can be enforced, even after it is signed.
No, it can't be coercive, by definition. If a jury of your peers deems that you did not provide informed consent, then the contract is void. A contract cannot be deemed both coercive and valid under common-law/libertarian principles.
Coercion is when someone reduces your option set, by threatening violence (against the person or property of you or someone you love). An offer, that you are free to reject, and have the faculty to fully comprehend, cannot meet the definition of coercive.
As for selling yourself into slavery, that calls into question whether the you that exists today has a right to the you that exists in the future to the extent that the current you possesses a right to sell that you's liberty away, and I am fairly a certain a court would rule you don't.
But these extreme/fantastical scenarios are not what libertarians are arguing about. There are far more mundane examples of people's liberty being repressed by anti-libertarian laws, that anti-libertarian apologists cannot excuse, so they resort to these hyperbolic examples.
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