Most publishers realize that there are always freelancers out there willing to work for less than they're paying the talent now or even for nothing, writers and artists willing to sign bad contracts and accept terrible treatment to get their names in print. The unscrupulous ones take advantage of that truth.
There are plenty of unscrupulous writers who will side with those unscrupulous publishers and editors, too. In public dust ups, they're the ones that attack the writers complaining about the lack of pay or poor treatment, in hopes of getting better treatment themselves; of course, they eventually get burned by the offending publishers, too. (That's not to say, of course, that the freelancer is always the abused party in these public feuds; plenty of freelancers burn publishers, too. That said, the publishers tend to be the ones with all the power, thanks to the typical industry contract.)
Writers groups are of limited value here. The National Writers Union does good work, but it's very expensive to join. Places like HWA and SFWA have grievance committees, but these can be of
very limited value, in large part because the groups are run by working writers who really don't want to annoy places that might hire them. There's no equivalent group for RPG designers and efforts to create a branch of GAMA for designers/freelancers have been unsuccessful.
So you're mostly on your own. The trick is to educate yourself on contracts enough to recognize bad ones, then learn to say "no" to them.
Cheers,
Jim Lowder
www.jameslowder.com
