I understand as long as you really believe you're kosher you're not responsible for the lapses of the one who prepared the food. But now you know...and it's the source of the vast majority of kosher meat in the country.
You see, there is precedent for declaring something nonkosher on the basis of how employees are treated. Yisroel Salanter, the great 19th-century rabbi, is famously believed to have refused to certify a matzo factory as kosher on the grounds that the workers were being treated unfairly. In addition to the hypocrisy of calling something kosher when it is being sold and produced in an unethical manner, we have to take into account disturbing information about the plant that has come to light.
Dark Meat
By SHMUEL HERZFELD
Washington
ACCORDING to the Jewish calendar we are now in the month of Av, a period of increasingly intense mourning that culminates with a total fast on the Ninth of Av, which this year coincides with Sunday, Aug. 10.
One of the customary practices in these nine days is the avoidance of meat: it’s the way we commemorate the destruction of the Temple, where daily animal sacrifices were once brought.
Refraining from food is symbolic, of course. The idea is not just to avoid meat but to limit ourselves so that we can better focus on the spiritual.
Unfortunately, this year kosher meat has become a different type of symbol, one not of mourning and spiritual devotion but of ridicule, embarrassment and hypocrisy. In May in Postville, Iowa, immigration officials raided Agriprocessors Inc., the largest kosher meatpacking plant in the country.
What began as an immigration sting, however, quickly took on larger dimensions. News reports and government documents have described abusive practices at Agriprocessors against workers, including minors. Children as young as 13 were said to be wielding knives on the killing floor; some teenagers were working 17-hour shifts, six days a week.
This poses a grave problem and calls into question whether the food processed in the plant qualifies as kosher.
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From a 2006 NY Times article
From a 2006 NY Times article about the Postville plant:
"Conditions at the plant — AgriProcessors Inc. of Postville, Iowa — created a controversy in late 2004, when PETA released a videotape taken clandestinely inside. It showed that after steers were cut by a ritual slaughterer, other workers pulled out the animals' tracheas with a hook to speed bleeding. In the tape, animals were shown staggering around the killing pen with their windpipes dangling out, slamming their heads against walls and soundlessly trying to bellow. One animal took three minutes to stop moving."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/10/national/10kosher.html
Federal law requires that animal be stunned before they are killed, but gives an exemption for "religious slaughter". The "Hasidic Jews from Brooklyn " that own and run the plant are already recruiting in Guatemala for replacement works according to various new sources (denied by Agriprocessors).