Reversing the image

How would something read if you changed the target group with another group ?

This is a good basic test to check for bias.

If the meaning changes dramatically and for the worse, then the article is written to a strict PC perspective and is not objective truth or knowledge.

I call it 'reversing the image'

For example in this article everywhere the word 'women' is used, change this to 'white males' and see how it then sounds.

When this is done it reverses the meaning of the article and makes it sounds as if strong white male discrimination is going on, rather than the benign helping of affirmative action for and by women .

Women on boards bring more women to top U.S. jobs

514 words
23 July 2008
09:02 pm GMT
Reuters News
English
(c) 2008 Reuters Limited

By Ellen Wulfhorst

NEW YORK, July 23 (Reuters Life!) - As women struggle to crack corporate America's so-called glass ceiling, they may find more success in breaking the job barrier from the top down, a study said on Wednesday.

The more women on a company's board of directors, the more women are likely to be among that company's senior management, according to the study by Catalyst, a nonprofit organization that researches and helps promote women in business.

Firms with 30 percent of women board directors in 2001 on average had 45 percent more women corporate officers by 2006, compared with ones with no female board members, it said.

Companies with the lowest percentages of women board directors in 2001 on average had 26 percent fewer female corporate officers than those with the highest number five years later, the study said. Those with two or more women board members in 2001 had 25 percent more female corporate officers by 2006 than those with just one woman board member.

"What this shows is that the number of women, or more women, more directors today, predicts pretty reliably more women in leadership five years from now," said Ilene Lang, president of Catalyst.

"There is a very strong correlation and a very strong predictor ability," she said.

The number of Fortune 500 companies with 25 percent or more women on their boards is growing as well, Catalyst said. In 2001, 30 companies fit that criteria and that number grew to 68 in 2007, according to Catalyst data.

"Companies that build up the representation of women on the board and, especially if they're at 25 percent today, this shows them a road map, a path, for how they can increase women in leadership tomorrow," Lang said.

Catalyst said it studied 359 companies in the Fortune 500 in 2000, 2001, 2006 and 2007.

Despite fresh statistics showing women are leaving the work force at the same rate as men amid the current economic downturn, Lang said plenty of women are available to move into the top ranks of corporate management.

"There still is a very healthy, robust pipeline of women in the work force," she said. "The supply is much higher than they've been able to realize in those top leadership jobs."

Citing Bureau of Labor Statistics, The New York Times reported this week the rate of women in the work force, growing since the 1960s, had fallen of late due to layoffs, outsourcing, stagnant wages and other economic woes.

The proportion of women age 25 to 54 with jobs peaked at 74.9 percent in 2000 but last month was 72.7 percent, it said. It said the rate was essentially similar for well-educated or less-educated women, married or never married, white or black.

The Catalyst study, entitled Advancing Women: The Connection Between Women Board Directors and Women Corporate Officers, was sponsored by Chubb Corp, Citizen Communications and IBM Corp. (Editing by Bill Trott)

Modern Banking 101

Easy to overlook this item way down in the article. Normally I wouldn't notice anything strange about this, nor probably do just about every reader:

' ... The bank also had hired The Goldman Sachs Group Inc. to conduct an analysis of its loan portfolio and advise it on strategic alternatives. '

A 'bank', and one of the largest banks in the USA, needs some other firm (in this case an Investment Bank - Goldman Sachs ) to figure out it's loan portfolio?

What exactly does a 'bank' do , if not give out loans? Isn't this their prime business ? What firm outsources the work of managing and understanding their main core business?

This implies that modern mortgage bundling is so new and convoluted in comparison to the old standard management of bank loans/mortgages , that it is basically unfathomable to a 'bank'.

So it is a business that is not part of a bank's core business and perhaps it is one that they shouldn't be in .

Or maybe they bought Golden West Financial and had no idea what they were buying and relied on an investment house (Goldman Sachs again?) to advise them on that acquisition.

In both cases upper management is the primary culprit.

Top management has already been let go at Wachovia .
Did they get golden parachutes?
Did they profit handsomely over the past few years when they seemed to be mis-managing the company?
Did they have to return past financial rewards ?

No. But over 6,000 workers will lose their jobs due to their horrendous management.

Wachovia loses $8.9B, cuts 6,350 workers, dividend

By IEVA M. AUGSTUMS, AP Business Writer2 hours, 21 minutes ago

Wachovia Corp. reported a surprisingly large second-quarter loss Tuesday, deflating Wall Street's hopes that the nation's big banks are weathering the credit crisis well. The nation's fourth-largest bank by assets said it lost $8.86 billion, is slashing its dividend and eliminating 10,750 positions after losses tied to mortgages soared.

Even excluding one-time items, the results substantially missed Wall Street estimates.

"These bottom-line results are disappointing and unacceptable," Chairman Lanty Smith said in a statement. "While to some degree they reflect industry headwinds and weaker macroeconomic conditions, they also reflect performance for which we at Wachovia accept responsibility."

Wachovia said it lost the equivalent of $4.20 per share in the April-June period. In the same timeframe last year, the bank earned $2.34 billion, or $1.22 per share.

Excluding $6.1 billion in write-downs to the value of its intangible assets and merger-related and restructuring charges of $128 million, Wachovia lost $2.67 billion, or $1.27 per share. Second quarter results include the bank's October acquisition of A.G. Edwards Inc.

Analysts on average expected a loss of 78 cents per share on revenue of almost $8.4 billion.

Earlier this month, Wachovia had projected a $2.6 billion to $2.8 billion quarterly loss, equal to $1.23 to $1.33 per share, excluding goodwill items.

The Charlotte-based bank cut its quarterly dividend to 5 cents per share from 37.5 cents, which will conserve approximately $700 million of capital per quarter. In April, Wachovia slashed its dividend 41 percent.

As part of a plan to cut 2009 expenses by $1.5 billion, the bank said it would lay off 6,350 workers and eliminate 4,400 open positions and contractors.

During the quarter, the Wachovia boosted its provision for loan losses to $5.57 billion from $179 million a year ago, and added $4.2 billion to its reserves for bad loans.

Wachovia has been suffering from its 2006 acquisition of Golden West Financial Corp. The bank paid roughly $25 billion for the California mortgage lender known for exotic loans.

The so-called "Pick-a-Payment" loans, which Wachovia inherited from Golden West, have proved a headache for the bank and a lightning rod for shareholders, defaulting at higher rates than other mortgages.

Wachovia recently discontinued offering the "Pick-A-Payment" loan option, which allows customers to pay a less-than-full interest payment on all new home loans. The bank also had hired The Goldman Sachs Group Inc. to conduct an analysis of its loan portfolio and advise it on strategic alternatives.

Late Monday, Wachovia announced plans to leave the wholesale mortgage lending business. And beginning Friday, the company will no longer offer mortgages through brokers, joining other lenders making similar moves to exit the troubled sector.

Big banks, such as Bank of America Corp. and National City Corp., have stopped making loans through brokers entirely, relying instead on their loan officers. National City said it was forced to do so by a continuing downturn in loan demand, while Bank of America said it saw better "long-term opportunity" in working through its own loan officers.

Wachovia spokesman Don Vecchiarello said in a statement that the company "recognized some opportunities to re-position our business" given the current market conditions.

Earlier this month, Wachovia named former Treasury Undersecretary and Goldman Sachs executive Robert Steel as chief executive, replacing the ousted Ken Thompson. Within a week of being on the job, the bank's shares tumbled to a new 17-year low.

Buy American - but what is American? Part II

From an article today about the new Chevrolet Camaro coming in 2010:

Most of the engineering for the Camaro was done in Australia, where rear-wheel-drive cars are more common than in the United States. The cars will be produced in Canada, however.

It didn't mention where the parts themselves are being built but it wouldn't surprise me if much of them are produced in Brazil and other countries, with final assembly in Canada.

So what is American about this car, besides the corporate headquarters ?

This is the model for American companies nowadays ... the corporate and financial center in the US, where most of the main decisions are made, e.g. build a Camaro or not ? And virtually all the remaining design, development, manufacturing and final assembly done outside US borders.

This model can't hold. At some point the corporate headquarters must shift to lower-cost and lower-tax countries. This will be a lot harder to accomplish as taxes and politics are heavily involved, but the inevitable inertia of this off-shoring process is for companies to seek the lowest cost in everything , including taxes and financial aid .

US science majors still dwindling

The critical question about any new 'report' is 'Who is funding it?' .

Egg producers sponsor reports that eggs are not bad for you.

Drug companies create reports that their medicines are beneficial with no side-effects.

And , surprise, surprise ... CEOs and business organizations claim, in this report, that Americans aren't pursuing science careers .

Perhaps there are several reasons for this:

• most job growth is overseas not in the US or Developed countries
• initial salaries are not high compared with other professions and future salary growth is especially low.

During the initial dot.com boom days it was hard to find an opening in a Comp Sci program in any college since there were fortunes to be made. After the bust and subsequent moving of tech jobs overseas, comp sci depts have few students/majors and many may close shop soon.

Foreign workers can make multiple times most local salaries working in the US , so the incentives to get into these fields are huge. People can live upper-middle class lifestyles on the salaries compared to other options in their home countries. For Americans the reward of a science degree, which are difficult studies, is mediocre initial salaries and very poor career opportunities as jobs shift to cheaper overseas countries.

Why study so hard for this race to the bottom?

Report: U.S. lagging in sci-tech grads

• Story Highlights
• Business groups warn a lack of sci-tech experts is a threat to U.S. competitiveness
  
• They set a goal of 400,000 annual new graduates in science and tech fields by 2015
  
• But new report states that new degrees in those fields have stalled at about 225,000
  
• CEO: "This [issue] is on the top three CEO agendas of every company I know"
  

(AP) -- A high-profile push by business groups to double the number of U.S. bachelor's degrees awarded in science, math and engineering by 2015 is falling way behind target, a new report says.

In 2005, 15 prominent business groups warned that a lack of expert workers and teachers posed a threat to U.S. competitiveness, and said the country would need 400,000 new graduates annually in the so-called STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields by 2015.

In an update published Tuesday, the group reports the number of degrees in those fields rose slightly earlier in the decade, citing figures from the years after 2001 that have become available since the first report was published. But the number of degrees has since flattened out at around 225,000 per year.

The coalition, representing groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Defense Industrial Association, said there has been substantial bipartisan support in Washington for boosting science training, including passage last year of the "America Competes Act," which promotes math and science.

But Susan Traiman, director of education and work force policy for the Business Roundtable, an organization of corporate CEOs, said there's been insufficient follow-through with funding to support the programs. Other countries, she said, are doing more to shift incentives toward science training.

"The concern that CEOs have is if we wait for a Sputnik-like event, it's very hard to turn around and get moving on the kind of timeline we would need," said Traiman, referring to the Soviet Union's launch of the first artificial satellite in 1957, which prompted a massive U.S. commitment to science investment.

"It still takes a minimum of 17 years to produce an engineer if you consider K-12 plus four years of colleges," she said.

Some critics have called concerns from business about the number of science graduates overblown and self-serving. They have argued that if there really were a pent-up demand for scientists, more students would naturally move toward those fields -- without massive incentives from taxpayers.

But William Green, CEO and chairman of Accenture, a giant global consulting company, called such criticisms "nonsense," adding the whole country benefits from competitive companies.

"This is on the top three CEO agendas of every company I know," Green told the Associated Press in a telephone interview.

Green said Accenture, which will hire about 58,000 people worldwide this year, will spend $780 million on training. (but where? most of this is for overseas workers )

"I feel like I can step up to the table and say I'm doing my part. Other companies are doing the same thing," Green said. "What I'm suggesting is I really could use more raw material. That's about having federal leadership."

Elsewhere in the world, he sees "a laser focus," both in the public and private sectors, on developing work forces for competitive companies.

The report by the group Tapping America's Potential, which has grown to represent 16 business groups, also argues that the failure of Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform has hurt U.S. competitiveness by making it difficult to retain high-skill workers who study at American universities. (again lobbying for bringing in foreign workers. Many times they study here paid by their governments. Maybe our government should pay for science education!)

While there appears to be, if anything, a surplus in the job market of scientists with doctoral degrees, the case for boosting bachelor's degrees is stronger -- particularly for people who go into teaching, where teachers who have college-level subject training are generally more effective.

Last week, The National Research Council -- a group that provides policy advice under a Congressional charter -- issued a report calling for more support for professional master's degrees programs. The idea would be to provide advanced training to more people in fields like chemistry and biology, which require less time and money than doctoral degrees.

Now that's inflation !

Last month the US government said the inflation rate was 4.2% which seemed to me to be extraordinarily low. I would think that inflation has been running over 10% for a couple of years but this past year, because of oil, it may be over 20%.

But it could be worse. Zimbabwe is suffering an unimaginable rate. At some point .. 100,000 or 1 million .... this statistic should be retired and they need to just say that the currency has absolutely no value and no one has any faith in that government.

July 16, 2008

Zimbabwe Inflation Hits 2.2 Million Percent

By REUTERS

Filed at 7:53 a.m. ET

HARARE (Reuters) - Zimbabwe's annual inflation rate, already the highest in the world, has hit 2.2 million percent, central bank Governor Gideon Gono said on Wednesday.

"Some independent economists say our inflation is 7 million percent annually but the CSO (Central Statistical Office) says it's 2.2 million percent," Gono said at the launch of a government program to supply basic goods.

The last official inflation figure of 164,900 percent year-on-year for February was released in April.

Forming a matriarchal society

Boy I wish I was college-age today. Women now get most of the degrees and now get many of the best jobs.

You just have to find the right one to marry and you're all set !

A total role reversal in 50 years.

Even with blue-collar work ... last week Atlanta decided to change it's 'Men at Work' street signs since a couple of workers on the crews were female .

July 15, 2008

Findings

A New Frontier for Title IX: Science

By JOHN TIERNEY

Until recently, the impact of Title IX, the law forbidding sexual discrimination in education, has been limited mostly to sports. But now, under pressure from Congress, some federal agencies have quietly picked a new target: science.

The National Science Foundation, NASA and the Department of Energy have set up programs to look for sexual discrimination at universities receiving federal grants. Investigators have been taking inventories of lab space and interviewing faculty members and students in physics and engineering departments at schools like Columbia, the University of Wisconsin, M.I.T. and the University of Maryland.

So far, these Title IX compliance reviews haven’t had much visible impact on campuses beyond inspiring a few complaints from faculty members. (The journal Science quoted Amber Miller, a physicist at Columbia, as calling her interview “a complete waste of time.”) But some critics fear that the process could lead to a quota system that could seriously hurt scientific research and do more harm than good for women.

The members of Congress and women’s groups who have pushed for science to be “Title Nined” say there is evidence that women face discrimination in certain sciences, but the quality of that evidence is disputed. Critics say there is far better research showing that on average, women’s interest in some fields isn’t the same as men’s.

In this debate, neither side doubts that women can excel in all fields of science. In fact, their growing presence in former male bastions of science is a chief argument against the need for federal intervention.

Despite supposed obstacles like “unconscious bias” and a shortage of role models and mentors, women now constitute about half of medical students, 60 percent of biology majors and 70 percent of psychology Ph.D.’s. They earn the majority of doctorates in both the life sciences and the social sciences. They remain a minority in the physical sciences and engineering. Even though their annual share of doctorates in physics has tripled in recent decades, it’s less than 20 percent. Only 10 percent of physics faculty members are women, a ratio that helped prompt an investigation in 2005 by the American Institute of Physics into the possibility of bias.

But the institute found that women with physics degrees go on to doctorates, teaching jobs and tenure at the same rate that men do. The gender gap is a result of earlier decisions. While girls make up nearly half of high school physics students, they’re less likely than boys to take Advanced Placement courses or go on to a college degree in physics.

These numbers don’t surprise two psychologists at Vanderbilt University, David Lubinski and Camilla Persson Benbow, who have been tracking more than 5,000 mathematically gifted students for 35 years.

They found that starting at age 12, the girls tended to be better rounded than the boys: they had relatively strong verbal skills in addition to math, and they showed more interest in “organic” subjects involving people and other living things. Despite of their mathematical prowess, they were less likely than boys to go into physics or engineering.

But whether they grew up to be biologists or sociologists or lawyers, when they were surveyed in their 30s, these women were as content with their careers as their male counterparts. They also made as much money per hour of work. Dr. Lubinski and Dr. Benbow concluded that adolescents’ interests and balance of abilities — not their sex — were the best predictors of whether they would choose an “inorganic” career like physics.

A similar conclusion comes from a new study of the large gender gap in the computer industry by Joshua Rosenbloom and Ronald Ash of the University of Kansas. By administering vocational psychological tests, the researchers found that information technology workers especially enjoyed manipulating objects and machines, whereas workers in other occupations preferred dealing with people.

Once the researchers controlled for that personality variable, the gender gap shrank to statistical insignificance: women who preferred tinkering with inanimate objects were about as likely to go into computer careers as were men with similar personalities. There just happened to be fewer women than men with those preferences.

Now, you might think those preferences would be different if society didn’t discourage girls and women from pursuits like computer science and physics. But if you read “The Sexual Paradox,” Susan Pinker’s book about gender differences, you’ll find just the opposite problem.

Ms. Pinker, a clinical psychologist and columnist for The Globe and Mail in Canada (and sister of Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist), argues that the campaign for gender parity infantilizes women by assuming they don’t know what they want. She interviewed women who abandoned successful careers in science and engineering to work in fields like architecture, law and education — and not because they had faced discrimination in science.

Instead, they complained of being pushed so hard to be scientists and engineers that they ended up in jobs they didn’t enjoy. “The irony was that talent in a male-typical pursuit limited their choices,” Ms. Pinker says. “Once they showed aptitude for math or physical science, there was an assumption that they’d pursue it as a career even if they had other interests or aspirations. And because these women went along with the program and were perceived by parents and teachers as torch bearers, it was so much more difficult for them to come to terms with the fact that the work made them unhappy.”

Ms. Pinker says that universities and employers should do a better job helping women combine family responsibilities with careers in fields like physics. But she also points out that female physicists are a distinct minority even in Western European countries that offer day care and generous benefits to women.

“Creating equal opportunities for women does not mean that they’ll choose what men choose in equal numbers,” Ms. Pinker says. “The freedom to act on one’s preferences can create a more exaggerated gender split in some fields.”

Applying Title IX to science was proposed eight years ago by Debra Rolison, a chemist at the Naval Research Laboratory. She argued that withholding federal money from “poorly diversified departments” was essential to “transform the academic culture.” The proposal was initially greeted, in her words, with “near-universal horror.”

Some female scientists protested that they themselves would be marginalized if a quota system revived the old stereotype that women couldn’t compete on even terms in science. But the idea had strong advocates, too, and Congress quietly ordered agencies to begin the Title IX compliance reviews in 2006.

The reviews so far haven’t led to any requirements for gender balance in science departments. But Christina Hoff Sommers, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who has written extensively about gender wars in academia, predicts that lawyers will work gradually, as they did in sports, to require numerical parity.

“Colleges already practice affirmative action for women in science, but now they’ll be so intimidated by the Title IX legal hammer that they may institute quota systems,” Dr. Sommers said. “In sports, they had to eliminate a lot of male teams to achieve Title IX parity. It’ll be devastating to American science if every male-dominated field has to be calibrated to women’s level of interest.”

Whether or not quotas are ever imposed, some of the most productive science and engineering departments in America are busy filling out new federal paperwork. The agencies that have been cutting financing for Fermilab and the Spirit rover on Mars are paying for investigations of a problem that may not even exist. How is this good for scientists of either sex?

Illiterate illegals

If the immigrants 'could not read or write' as the interpreter claims then should they have been allowed to work in a meatpacking plant? An industry with one of the highest labor accident/injury rates, where the understanding of written safety rules and guidelines in the work environment are critical to minimize accidents?

Does he mean that they were unable to read and write in Spanish also ?

If they could not read safety manuals or understand signs in the plant this would undoubtedly lead to more accidents and is probably a violation of labor laws.

If true then the owners should be tried in criminal court for knowingly hiring illiterate workers and putting them at risk of serious injury.

And, if true, the government is doing the right thing by protecting these workers, whether legal or illegal, from this abuse.

July 11, 2008

An Interpreter Speaking Up for Migrants

By JULIA PRESTON

WATERLOO, Iowa — In 23 years as a certified Spanish interpreter for federal courts, Erik Camayd-Freixas has spoken up in criminal trials many times, but the words he uttered were rarely his own.

Then he was summoned here by court officials to translate in the hearings for nearly 400 illegal immigrant workers arrested in a raid on May 12 at a meatpacking plant. Since then, Mr. Camayd-Freixas, a professor of Spanish at Florida International University, has taken the unusual step of breaking the code of confidentiality among legal interpreters about their work.

In a 14-page essay he circulated among two dozen other interpreters who worked here, Professor Camayd-Freixas wrote that the immigrant defendants whose words he translated, most of them villagers from Guatemala, did not fully understand the criminal charges they were facing or the rights most of them had waived.

In the essay and an interview, Professor Camayd-Freixas said he was taken aback by the rapid pace of the proceedings and the pressure prosecutors brought to bear on the defendants and their lawyers by pressing criminal charges instead of deporting the workers immediately for immigration violations.

He said defense lawyers had little time or privacy to meet with their court-assigned clients in the first hectic days after the raid. Most of the Guatemalans could not read or write, he said. Most did not understand that they were in criminal court.

“The questions they asked showed they did not understand what was going on,” Professor Camayd-Freixas said in the interview. “The great majority were under the impression they were there because of being illegal in the country, not because of Social Security fraud.”

During fast-paced hearings in May, 262 of the illegal immigrants pleaded guilty in one week and were sentenced to prison — most for five months — for knowingly using false Social Security cards or legal residence documents to gain jobs at the Agriprocessors kosher meat plant in nearby Postville. It was the largest criminal enforcement operation ever carried out by immigration authorities at a workplace.

The essay has provoked new questions about the Agriprocessors proceedings, which had been criticized by criminal defense and immigration lawyers as failing to uphold the immigrants’ right to due process. Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California and chairwoman of the House Judiciary immigration subcommittee, said she would hold a hearing on the prosecutions and call Professor Camayd-Freixas as a witness.

“The essay raises questions about whether the charges brought were supported by the facts,” Ms. Lofgren said.

Bob Teig, a spokesman for Matt M. Dummermuth, the United States attorney for the Northern District of Iowa, said the immigrants’ constitutional rights were not compromised.

“All defendants were provided with experienced criminal attorneys and interpreters before they made any decisions in their criminal cases,” Mr. Teig said. “Once they made their choices, two independent judicial officers determined the defendants were making their choices freely and voluntarily, were satisfied with their attorney, and were, in fact, guilty.”

Mr. Teig said the judges in the cases were satisfied with the guilty pleas.

“The judges had the right and duty to reject any guilty plea where a defendant was not guilty,” Mr. Teig said. “No plea was rejected.”

The essay by Professor Camayd-Freixas, who is the director of a program to train language interpreters at the university, has also caused a stir among legal interpreters. In telephone calls and debates through e-mail, they have discussed whether it was appropriate for a translator to speak publicly about conversations with criminal defendants who were covered by legal confidentiality.

“It is quite unusual that a legal interpreter would go to this length of writing up an essay and taking a strong stance,” said Nataly Kelly, an analyst with Common Sense Advisory, a marketing research company focused on language services. Ms. Kelly is a certified legal interpreter who is the author of a manual about interpreting.

The Agriprocessors hearings were held in temporary courtrooms in mobile trailers and a ballroom at the National Cattle Congress, a fairgrounds here in Waterloo. Professor Camayd-Freixas worked with one defense lawyer, Sara L. Smith, translating her discussions with nine clients she represented. He also worked in courtrooms during plea and sentencing hearings.

Ms. Smith praised Professor Camayd-Freixas’s essay, saying it captured the immigrants’ distress during “the surreal two weeks” of the proceedings. She said he had not revealed information that was detrimental to her cases.

But she cautioned that interpreters should not commonly speak publicly about conversations between lawyers and clients. “It is not a practice that I would generally advocate as I could envision circumstances under which such revelations could be damaging to a client’s case,” Ms. Smith said.

Professor Camayd-Freixas said he had considered withdrawing from the assignment, but decided instead that he could play a valuable role by witnessing the proceedings and making them known.

He suggested many of the immigrants could not have knowingly committed the crimes in their pleas. “Most of the clients we interviewed did not even know what a Social Security card was or what purpose it served,” he wrote.

He said many immigrants could not distinguish between a Social Security card and a residence visa, known as a green card. They said they had purchased fake documents from smugglers in Postville, or obtained them directly from supervisors at the Agriprocessors plant. Most did not know that the original cards could belong to Americans and legal immigrants, Mr. Camayd-Freixas said.

Ms. Smith went repeatedly over the charges and the options available to her clients, Professor Camayd-Freixas said. He cited the reaction of one Guatemalan, Isaías Pérez Martínez: “No matter how many times his attorney explained it, he kept saying, ‘I’m illegal, I have no rights. I’m nobody in this country. Just do whatever you want with me.’ ”

Professor Camayd-Freixas said Mr. Pérez Martínez wept during much of his meeting with Ms. Smith.

Ms. Smith, like more than a dozen other court-appointed defense lawyers, concluded that none of the immigrants’ legal options were good. Prosecutors had evidence showing they had presented fraudulent documents when they were hired at Agriprocessors.

In plea agreements offered by Mr. Dummermuth, the immigrants could plead guilty to a document fraud charge and serve five months in prison. Otherwise, prosecutors would try them on more serious identity theft charges carrying a mandatory sentence of two years. In any scenario, even if they were acquitted, the immigrants would eventually be deported.

Worried about families they had been supporting with their wages, the immigrants readily chose to plead guilty because they did understand that was the fastest way to return home, Professor Camayd-Freixas said.

“They were hoping and they were begging everybody to deport them,” he said.

Ms. Smith said she was convinced after examining the prosecutors’ evidence that it was not in her clients’ interests to go to trial.

“I think they understood what their options were,” she said. “I tried to make it very clear.”

Legal interpreters familiar with the profession said that Professor Camayd-Freixas’ essay, while a notable departure from the norm, did not violate professional standards.

Isabel Framer, a certified legal interpreter from Ohio who is chairwoman of the National Association of Judiciary Interpreters and Translators, said Professor Camayd-Freixas did not go public while the cases were still in court or reveal information that could not be discerned from the record. Ms. Framer said she was speaking for herself because her organization had not taken an official position on the essay.

“Interpreters, just like judges and attorneys, have an obligation to maintain the confidentiality of the process,” she said. “But they don’t check their ethical standards at the door.”