Gig workers are independent contractors, online platform workers, contract firm workers, on-demand workers, and temporary workers. Gig workers enter into formal agreements with on-demand companies to provide services to the company's clients. They are part of the gig economy.

In many countries, the legal classification of gig workers is still being debated, with companies classifying their workers as "independent contractors", while organized labor advocates have been lobbying for them to be classified as "employees", which would legally require companies to provide the full suite of employee benefits like time-and-a-half for overtime, paid sick time, employer-provided health care, bargaining rights, and unemployment insurance, among others. In 2020, California approved by popular vote Proposition 22, which created a third-worker classification of gig-worker-drivers as contractors but maintained certain benefits such as minimum wage and mileage reimbursement.

Gig has various meanings in English, but it has two modern meanings: any paid job or role, especially for a musician or a performer and any job, especially one that is temporary.

The earliest usage of the word gig in the sense of "any, usually temporary, paid job" is from a 1952 piece by Jack Kerouac about his gig as a part-time brakeman for the Southern Pacific Railroad.

In the 2000s, the digital transformation of the economy and industry accelerated due to advances in information and communication technologies, such as the Internet, and the popularization of smartphones. As a result, on-demand platforms based on digital technology have created jobs and employment forms that are differentiated from existing offline transactions by the level of accessibility, convenience, and price competitiveness.

Normally, "work" refers to a full-time job with set working hours and benefits. But the definition of work began to change with shifting economic conditions and ongoing technological advances, and these changes in the economy created a new labor force characterized by independent, contractual labor.

Uberisation or uberization is a neologism describing the commercialization of an existing service industry by new participants using computing platforms, such as mobile applications, to aggregate transactions between clients and providers of a service, often bypassing the role of existing intermediaries as part of the so-called platform economy. This business model has different operating costs compared to a traditional business.

Uberization is derived from the company name "Uber". Uberization has also raised concerns about government regulations and taxation, insofar as the formalized application of the sharing economy has led to disputes over the extent to which providers of services via an Uberized platform should be held accountable for corporate regulations and tax obligations. In 2018, 36% of US workers joined in the gig economy through either their primary or secondary jobs. The number of people working in major economies is generally less than 10 percent of the economically viable population, according in Europe, 9.7% of adults from 14 EU countries participated in the gig economy in 2017, according to the survey. Meanwhile, it is estimated that the gig worker size, which covers independent or non-conventional workers, is 20% to 30% of the economically active population in the United States and Europe.