Each year, the major dictionary publishers issue lists of new words that have made it into general usage. They’ll have to add a new one in 2009: “gangmaster.”

What’s a gangmaster? It’s a person who supplies labor or uses workers to provide services in agriculture, forestry, horticulture, food processing and packaging, among other industries. Gangmasters often find their workers through “recruiters” who prey upon illegal immigrants, the poor and dispossessed, and sell these unfortunates to gangmasters, who make deals with businesses to hire gangs of these workers to perform some of the world’s nastiest and most mind-numbing jobs, often for pittance wages — or no pay at all.

This trade in human beings sounds like a contemporary version of chattel slavery, according to police officials in the United Kingdom. There, according to recent reports, upwards of 100,000 workers hold subsistence jobs in a variety of industries, controlled by an estimated 30,000 gangmasters who dominate virtually every aspect of the lives of those under their thumb.

The situation is so serious in the U.K. that government officials created an agency, the Gangmasters Licensing Authority (LGA) in 2004 in an attempt to gain some control over what many believe is an especially virulent form of human trafficking on a global scale. In Scotland, a still secret government report concludes that human trafficking has become such a problem that the nation needs to create a special police unit devoted solely in human slavery issues.

The extent of trafficking in the U.K. is the subject of recent reports in the British newspaper, The Herald. As the Obama Administration settles into office, it will eventually have to confront human trafficking issues in the United States, and a good place to start might be to look at what’s happening in the British Isles.