Allow me to put forth a scenario.

You have a group of 50 people with roughly the same skill-set applying for 25 positions of the same type of 9-month contract job. The job they are applying for pays very little, the hours are quite long, there are no company benefits, it is assumed that the employees are eager, but also lazy and inept (cause why the hell else would they apply for such a job), no one will thank them for their efforts, and there is little-to-no confidence that the job will lead to anything bigger in their career even though they are explicitly told otherwise. Out of those 25 people, 13 will quit within the first six months for a variety of issues, but mostly due to working conditions. This hardly matters to the employer because they can be quickly replaced by other very eager, lazy, and inept people that can get up to speed in a matter of hours rather than weeks.

If you are an employee in that circumstance, you may want to quit, you may think that it’s time for you and yours to unionize, and you may never want to do contract work again. If you’re the employer, that rate of turnover is bad but the labor requires so little training that it doesn't matter too much. Any real talent among those employees is lost because they all kind of blend together and distinguishing themselves in that group is difficult. Besides, these kids are mostly out of college or even high school and the job market isn't good to begin with.

None of what I just described is specific to quality assurance work in gaming or even the gaming industry in general. Contract abuse and having a cattle call to rally the work force is pervasive across all industries in nearly every country that can support said industry. The Kotaku article regarding freelance contract QA work does have some salient points, albeit points that have been made many times before across many different professions with gaming. “STRIKE!” “UNIONIZE!” These things are very easy to say, especially after the fact. But unionization is not an easy solution to implement nor does it come without a cost.

Most agree that the treatment of QA is a problem, but fixing that requires fixing the nature of how the industry treats contract employees in general. If you want to help video game QA, changing how QA is perceived by a publisher would certainly be a step in the right direction. That includes not posting articles on gaming websites essentially complaining about a job to which you should have known better what you were in for.