Meg's schedule looked fair. Every person had four jobs. The newcomers saw the inequity at once. (inequity: unfairness, injustice, discrimination) Watering four plants took less time than hauling four buckets up four flights. Equality in the number of duties could exist alongside a profound inequality in the labor they required. (inequality: disparity, unevenness, imbalance) Meg's distributive rule counted marks on a page. (distributive: allocative, apportioning)
Her deputy wanted to compensate the porter in cash. (compensate: pay, reimburse, recompense) The porter preferred time to sit with his son. He had no automatic aversion to hard work. (aversion: antipathy, distaste, dislike) His aversion was to missing every performance of the school band. The deputy, embarrassed by the disproportionate fuss he had made over one late bucket, finally asked when the band rehearsed. (disproportionate: inordinate, excessive, unequal)
Under the new roster the share of work was proportionate to the time each task actually took. (proportionate: commensurate, proportional, corresponding) The porter could trade a morning of stairs for an evening at the bandstand. Meg took the bucket the first night. She made one trip before coming down for smaller pails. By the second trip she had thought of a further amendment, and a seat she would like to save for the porter's wife.