In its first years, the compact operated as a quiet safety network. Its members mapped unstable cuts and helped injured workers find care without depending on the concession's company doctor. The first major setback came when management dismissed an entire crew after a coordinated refusal to enter a flooded shaft. Several members left Slate Yard, and the compact's funds were exhausted keeping their families supplied. The watershed moment came during the Dry Count, a season when the yard's public wells failed and the concession claimed that its remaining water was reserved for production. The compact published a week of independent readings showing that water had been drawn from a spring used by three nearby settlements. The records were copied by hand and carried beyond Slate Yard before the concession could seize them. A regional hearing followed. It did not grant the compact control of the spring, but it established a temporary worker allotment and gave the compact standing to challenge future cuts to that share. That limited victory transformed the organization. Workers who had once seen it as a safety club began treating it as a political force. Small settlements joined, bringing local knowledge and demands of their own. The compact won new inspection rights in two cuts, then suffered another setback when a foreman was badly injured by a sabotage attempt falsely attributed to compact members. Since then, its public commitments to careful measurement and nonviolent stoppages have competed with members' anger and fear. Today it is growing, better connected, and less certain that its methods can keep pace with its ambitions.

A low-roofed meeting room behind a public washhouse in Slate Yard. Its walls are lined with slate tally boards, and a long cord runs around the room at shoulder height. Members knot it to record deaths, injuries, water shortages, and disputed decisions. The room is open for ordinary meetings, but the sealed archive of water readings is kept in a bricked recess beneath the floor.