I am very right wing, but I have the utmost respect for the Mick Lynch's and Bob Crow's of the world. They have mastered their arguments and practiced how to counter their opponents' points.
Those of us who disagree with what they have to say can and should do better than "good riddance" and "absolute idiot". Mick Lynch and Bob Crow have been successful because we who see the world in a different way have been lazy. We have not mastered our arguments or practiced them in debate.
Those of us who see the case against current Trade Union practices need to up our game and do much better.
I am completely on the opposite side to you on this. However I think there are a mixture of reasons as to why this is.
The only operator who from memory in recent times tried to counteract the unions was Southern during the disputes in 2016, and their "let's strike back" PR campaign was a total disaster, indeed it's worth looking at archives of the local press reporting into it at the time and the PR Week article on their opinion if you can.
So for example many commuters may dislike or even hate the unions as entities, but are less likely to hate the individual staff members they see regularly. But equally they are not going to see Southern, the DFT or Chris Grayling as heroes on their side either, so it is much more "can't the lot of you just get on like adults" rather than anything else. Passengers may dislike the unions but equally are not likely to sympathise with those they see increasing their fare costs and getting DOO, unstaffed stations and ironing board seats as the "gain" for this, nor a universally despised government minister.
Individual Southern managers during this period took a lot of flack and were identified in the press, possibly being forced to defend stuff they didn't even personally agree with or didn't even think was workable, whilst Grayling and Wilkinson fanned the flames but simply hid away when challenged directly.
Given what happened with Southern, it is not overly surprising that during the latest rounds of strikes no one from the train operators or Network Rail wanted to particularly appear in the press. It would have been a hard sell anyway to try and convince the public of the merits of the changes to working conditions (try convincing the public that Network Rail workers should buy their own vans). Arguing for cuts to track repairs can only be made on balance of probability arguments which don't win hearts and minds. And it's not like DOO / destaffing will be leading to lower fares, so the public will remain very sceptical of the DFT line, regardless of their view on the unions. Indeed whether or not guards / station staff are doing a good job when dealing with anti-social behaviour or managing delays / disruption, punters aren't daft and realise that DOO drivers are largely woefully ineffective (for obvious reasons) and staffless stations / help points overseas do absolutely nothing of value.
The result being that the opposition to Mick Lynch (and similar) consisted of a string of Tory MPs who either didn't really understand railways properly and simply parroted classic anti union attack lines. Or alternatively were just reviled loudmouths (e.g. Jonathan Gullis) who had zero appeal to anyone on the fence on the issue. The result with them being Lynch running rings round them.
The rest of the opposition was even worse and consisted of pointless childish tabloid "shock jock" journalism which largely consisted of "boo hoo you have ruined Christmas" or personal insults. At its very worst we had the likes of "socialite" Lizzy Cundy being drafted in to give us her largely pointless opinion, or Kelvin MacKenzie resorting to vile abuse which was borderline incitement - all of which likely had the effect of increasing Lynch's popularity with those on the fence.
At no point did I see any industry figures being drafted in to rebut Lynch. I suspect probably because the arguments against him wouldn't have been overly popular with the public (see the ticket office closure / retraction).
There is a wider issue however with railway PR aside from this. The industry is very poor at communicating anything.
