Not equating with, but certainly comparing with.  No two threats can be precisely equated.  A baseball bat is less imminently terrifying a threat than a gun to the head.  A fist in the face is somewhat less terrifying than a baseball bat.  Being threatened with a beating is not so bad as being threatened with the imminent execution of your entire extended family.  Watching your children go to bed hungry is somewhat less awful than watching your children beaten or raped.  Going hungry is less awful than being napalmed.  in any case where a more awful threat can be imagined, should we claim that the lesser threat doesn't constitute real coercion?

But unless there is a viable alternative to surrendering control of your life to the wealthy, i.e. being wage labour on any terms the wealthy care to set, then wage labour is not a "free" choice.  Going without basics like food, clothing, housing is not a viable or "equal" choice;  it is a threat, dating back to the enclosure of land and the control over peasants by hereditary landowning classes.  There are two reasons why the peasant must not hunt in the lord's woods;  one is that the lord wants to preserve the game for his own sporting purposes, but the other, more important one is that the peasant must remain dependent on the lord's largesse and favour for survival, to keep him properly subservient and obedient.  For the peasant to be able to feed himself and family by independent effort, without any noble's grace and favour, undermines the system of force and fraud that enforces unfree choices.

I don't consider it ad hominem to mention the obvious... that privilege -- yours, mine, anyone's -- can lead us to minimise in our minds the fear and coercion experienced by people who do not have our resources or armour against arbitrary power.  There is nothing inherently wrong with never having gone hungry -- would that no one ever did!  But as with age, disability, racism or any other burden, the fears and the behaviour-modifying potential of unemployment and poverty are harder to assess if one has never experienced them.  It is easy to tell other people how "free" their choices are when they are choices that I myself have never had to make, nor am likely to.

Or, to reverse the sense of what I just said, a dogmatic insistence on "choice" in unfree situations enables us to go on minimising and denying the degree of coercion and unfreedom experienced by those who actually have to live in those situations.  I can't remember whether it was Sartre or Camus who said that even on the way to the gallows we have the freedom to decide how we will approach the gibbet;  but that should not, imho, make us dismiss the experience of being hanged as a minor inconvenience.

Why would we draw an arbitrary line and say that one form of coercion (muscle or arms) creates bona fide unfreedom in the coerced, whereas another form of coercion using money (backed by muscle and arms in the end anyway) is not really coercion at all, and leaves its victims in a state of freedom?  I don't see any great distinction between money and muscle, when it comes to the workings of force and fraud in the real world.  In fact muscle could conceivably be seen as a more legitimate form of power than money -- since most of the greatest concentrations of money are unearned and inherited, the result of other people's effort, whereas to be a muscleman you at least have to exercise :-)

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...