Understanding Script Commands

[Draxis]

So I am working on troubleshooting one of the slave mods and ran into the issue that I can't get the NPC to work on farms etc. The dialogue triggers an AI package to auto_labor_mine or whatever it is, but the NPC stubbornly will not start working. Is this known behavior or something I can fix? Do these script commands actually cause the NPC to generate resources at the mine or is it just for flavor (I saw there is a pretend command). I feel I'm close to getting it to work so any help is appreciated.

Also, is there a way to prevent the slave tag from being cleared on the player? The alternative approach would be to have the NPC join the squad as a slave and remain as one for flavor. That seemed to work, but then they were considered to have escaped. Any ideas?