(FORTUNE Magazine) – A CEO we know has disgustedly passed along a note he and others received from the OAW -- the Labor Department's Office of the American Workplace. The OAW serves as a handy backdrop for Labor Secretary Robert Reich when he yearns to talk about ''empowering'' workers and the ''high-performance workplace.'' Those phrases do not signify the same things to everybody, but their meaning in the Labor Department is becoming all too clear. Reich wants companies to abolish the layoff solution to red ink. He wants stronger unions, and he wants , them to participate in corporate strategic planning. In promoting this vision among CEOs, he has come up with a selling proposition that would be utterly irresistible if only it were slightly plausible. The pitch: that companies taking the empowerment road will lift their stock prices. As our CEO pal wrote in the margin of his letter, ''Reich is determined to prove that you can beat the S&P by buying companies with great employee practices.'' The letter from OAW came with a Workplace Issues Discussion Guide, and asked for comments on it. We offer only three: (1) The guide presents as great news some alleged ''early indications'' that high-performance workplaces increase investment returns. What's eerie about this formulation is its implicit assumption that there may be such things as high-performance workplaces that depress, or at least don't raise, returns. Why would believers in capitalism count that as ''high''? (2) Fellows, you were unlucky to have CEOs reading that passage praising Xerox's empowerment practices just when (mid-December) the company was announcing layoffs of another 10,000 workers. (3) In a guide exalting high performance, and at one point linking it to the ''Baldridge National Quality Awards,'' it would have helped to avoid typesetting garbles -- also to spell Baldrige's name correctly.