Workflow does not start automatically when bulk inserting items

This had me tripped for a while. I was bulk inserting items (~800) to a list which had event receivers as well as a workflow attached.

The problem was that the workflow was not being triggered. Or if it did it just hung at In Progress.

After poking around for more than an hour I discovered that if I inserted a single item it worked. So to fix the issue I added a ten second sleep (Thread.Sleep) between the inserts and the workflows are triggering away happily.