My understanding is that the definition of feudalism is:
- Royalty allows vassals to "own" land in exchange for a portion of the income from the land.
- Royalty has an obligation to protect the vassals while vassals have an obligation to fight for the land owners.
- Similarly, vassals allowed peasants to "own" part of their land and were obligated to protect them in exchange for part of the income from the land.
- Peasants often were not allowed to leave their land (effectively change employers). However, it's not clear to me if this is an inherent feature of feudalism.
In terms of whether any of this is analogous to feudalism:
- I think you could draw a pretty solid analogy in a situation where a corporation provided a major piece of property (e.g. a vehicle) in exchange for continued labor. However, that seems more like something you see in trucking than in the modern gig economy.
- You could maybe argue that situations where a person rents the property they need to do their job (e.g. a car for Uber) is analogous to the way that peasants rented their land. However, a better analogy might be to some of the schemes where, for example, employees are paid in scrip which they also had to use to purchase their tools.
- You could argue that, feudalism is analogous to how working class people in many cities are unlikely to ever make enough to own a house and therefore they only "own" them (via renting) as long as they keep working. However, this seems like it's more about inequality in general than the gig economy specifically.
- The fact that employees often have to keep working for bad employees in order to avoid being labeled a "job hopper", due to a non-compete, or just due to the difficulties of changing jobs has reasonable similarities to peasants being unable to leave their land. However, these are problems that are actually more common in jobs that are outside the gig economy.
- In at least one sense modern employment relationships are worse than feudalism: In feudalism the vassal has an obligation to protect their peasants while a corporation can fire an employee at a moments notice. However, again this isn't restricted to the gig economy.
Overall, I agree with you that feudalism is a poor analogy for the gig economy specifically. However, I think it is a fair analogy for some aspects of modern capitalism as a whole.