There was an experiment to form a union of affiliates a number of years ago, and we supported it both through publicity and by establishing a dedicated forum within the GPWA to support it. Those of you who are long-time members here will probably remember the Gambling Affiliate Union (GAU) from nearly a decade ago. You can find the relevant threads here by searching GAU.
In my opinion, the issue was that there was never enough consistency in views to form a union that could effectively negotiate with more than a very small number of programs, and those weren't the programs that were rogue, but those that had enough of a conscience to be relatively easy to influence. At the time I had hoped the GAU would have more influence, and that by putting the weight of the GPWA behind it, we could together make a significant difference. Unfortunately, my hopes were never realized.
There is a more recent thread about an affiliate union here: We Need an Affiliates Union.
We have always supported organizations we believe work for the benefit of affiliates. For example, we publish Affiliate Guard Dog ratings on the GPWA website for every sponsor program, and have operated a forum here for AGD to provide greater publicity for its efforts. And when the APCW was a separate organization, we also supported them as well.
There were some comments made in this thread implying the GPWA looked first to serve its own selfish economic interests rather than those of affiliates. I respectfully disagree with that perspective. There are a large number of affiliate programs where we have severed relationships because we felt the programs were acting inappropriately, and in many of these cases I viewed that we were turning away sponsorship revenue that programs would have been happy to continue to pay us. Some specific examples that immediately come to mind include Active Wins, Affiliate Edge, Betfair, Buffalo Partners, bwin, and Stan James. If you look through the archives of past sponsor programs you will find many, many more. And that does not count the dozens of programs that wanted to be sponsors that we refused because they did not meet the requirements of our Code of Conduct at the time they applied.
There are also large numbers of programs who made modifications to their terms and conditions based on arguments we presented to the programs.
I don't mean to say the GPWA is perfect, because it is not. But there are things we do right. For example, while we insist on a certain level of professional conduct when issues are raised with affiliate programs, we generally allow members here to openly express their concerns with affiliate programs, and that includes with sponsor affiliate programs. There was once another major forum that actively censored criticisms of sponsor affiliate programs and claimed to certify programs. The GPWA has never operated that way.
Michael