I wrote earlier about former labor secretary Elaine Chao’s speech before the Capital Research Center’s labor conference yesterday. The conference also featured four panels; the two presentations I found most interesting were Timothy P. Carney’s assessment of teachers’ unions’ lobbying activities and the discussion on unionization and the economy (in which I participated).

The numbers $2.8 million and $2.5 million — the political contributions of the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association respectively over the last political cycle — may not seem big in the stimulus era. But relative to other lobbying budgets, they’re huge. Combined, these two unions spent more than the top two defense contractors, or the top four oil companies.

And while defense and oil money only tends to go to Republicans, teachers unions give almost exclusively to Democrats: 99 percent on the federal level. It would be 100 percent were it not for independents like Bernie Sanders and Joe Lieberman.

Regarding unions and economics, I offered a brief summary of a Labor Watch piece I wrote on the topic. I argued that while unions increase compensation for their members, they make companies less viable and drive down wages for non-union workers.

My co-panelists chipped away a little from the notion that union members are better off. The Heritage Foundation’s James Sherk pointed out that the “union wage advantage” varies remarkably depending on how you measure it and in some cases can be zero. The Hudson Insitute’s Diana Furchtgott-Roth spoke about union pension plans; these plans are often run mainly for the benefit of union officials, and are no better than the alternative for regular workers.

These are all topics, of course, that will only become more important as the Obama administration and Congress push more money into the educational system, and consider various laws to make unionization easier.