I spent two weeks delivering for Uber Eats and made $4.40 per hour

"Gig/Contract economy" is the analogue of outsourcing, except for the cheap workers being drawn from local population. Its a logical consequence from corporations wanting to reduce wages and legal trickery to avoid work liabilities and benefits for the workers. Its exploitative and ruthless example of what "capitalism" becomes when law doesn't hold the punch, companies just figured out the necessary mix of legal and tech means to avoid the system being labeled as "work" and pay fair wages/expenses per worker. Expect this type of "work" to increase and subsume new sectors of economy as they figure out how to transform them into uber model.

Outsourcing just means using another entity to do the work. Did you mean offshoring?

Outsourcing is the overarching concept to which offshoring and nearshoring belong. Obviously its much cheaper to outsource work to countries where wages are fraction of work rates in developed world. Startups use it agressively to reduce costs.

https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2016/01/12/startups-use-gig-econom...

Now we have some economy sectors where offshore locations don't make sense(work is service-oriented & local) and bringing foreign workers is more expensive/legally complicated than a job is worth for the company.

Thats where "gig economy" model comes in: it allows exploiting local workers for much cheaper wages, without bringing foreign labor. The outsourcing part is what work there was(regular food delivery jobs) made into granular contracts and "gigs"/"tasks", which divide the labor into independent segments(e.g. deliveries) where task distributed into local labor pool(as some kind of cloud computing with the humans being servers).