Under the Fingernails: A Day in the Life of Your Hands in Vermont

Ten jobs employ more Vermonters than any others. Here's what each one leaves under your nails by dinnertime — including the one that leaves nothing you can see.

ANALYSIS

When you wash your hands before dinner, do you ever look down and wonder what got under your fingernails all day?

Not the obvious days — the garden days, the days under the truck. The ordinary ones. The rim under each nail that you didn’t notice arriving, that you scrape at without thinking, that says something about the eight or ten hours you just spent. Most of us do one kind of work, all day, most days. And most of us go home with the residue of exactly that one thing under our nails, whether we look or not.

So here’s a question worth a few minutes: what is under the fingernails of a Vermonter at the end of an ordinary day? Not the Vermonter on the postcard. The one who actually clocked in this morning.

To answer it honestly, you have to start with who works here, and at what.

According to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics and its May 2025 count of Vermont jobs, the ten largest occupations in the state are these:

• Retail salespersons — 8,250

• General and operations managers — 8,000

• Home health and personal care aides — 7,700

• Registered nurses — 7,410

• Cashiers — 7,030

• Fast food and counter workers — 6,830

• Stockers and order fillers — 5,360

• Janitors and cleaners — 5,130

• Office clerks — 5,100

• Teaching assistants — 4,960

That’s 65,770 jobs — more than one in five of every job the survey counts in Vermont.

The Vermonters You Don’t Find on the Postcards

Read the list again, because it isn’t the Vermont we advertise. There’s no logger on it. No dairy farmer, no sugarmaker, no stonecutter, no ski instructor. The actual working day in Vermont happens on a sales floor, at a register, in a hospital corridor, behind a kitchen counter, in the aisles of a store after close, and in other people’s houses. That’s where the hands are.

So let’s look at them. What follows is what the work can leave behind — not a claim about every person who does it, but the residue these jobs are known to carry home.

Stock the shelves, run the floor.

The largest share of Vermont’s workday is retail — selling, stocking, ringing up. It looks clean. It isn’t; it’s just quiet. You break down boxes all shift, ride a box cutter against the same knuckle, move merchandise from truck to shelf to bag a thousand times over.

Under the nails:

• Fine gray cardboard dust, worked deep into the edge

• A box-cutter callus at the first knuckle

• Shrink-wrap static and the filmy gray of handled goods

Clean the building.

Vermont has more than 5,000 jobs classified as janitors and cleaners, and their hands tell on the chemistry more than the dirt. The building ends the day spotless. The hands that got it there don’t.

Under the nails:

• Bleach, degreaser, the ammonia bite of glass cleaner

• Yellowed nail plate and cuticles worn back

• The dry split in the skin where a stripping agent sat too long

Feed people.

Fast food and counter work — nearly 7,000 jobs, and that’s before you count the line cooks tallied separately. Grease is the honest one here: it gets under the nail and it does not come out with one wash, or two.

Under the nails:

• Fryer grease that survives the dish soap

• Salt, and the sheen you can smell at midnight

• The small shiny burn scars a kitchen collects on the backs of the fingers

Hold other people up.

Home health and personal care aides — 7,700 jobs, the third-largest occupation in the state. This is work you do with your hands kept short and bare, because you can’t do it with anything that could scratch or harbor. So the story under the nails isn’t dirt. It’s what the work costs the hands themselves — and, in home health, it’s that the workplace is someone else’s living room, for a median wage of about $20 an hour.

Under the nails:

• Not much — and that’s the point

• Cuticles cracked raw from washing and sanitizer, shift after shift

• Woodstove ash, a cold bathroom, the underside of a transfer belt — someone else’s house

And then the register.

Here’s where it gets strange.

If you run a cash register all day, you’d expect your hands to read like the retail list up top — cardboard, grime, the film of handling things. But there’s something on a cashier’s hands you can’t see at all.

Receipts.

Thermal receipt paper — the slick kind that fades in a year — makes its image through a heat-reactive chemical coating rather than ink. These days that coating is usually bisphenol S, or BPS, the substitute that replaced BPA after years of concern about it. Handle the paper and a little of the coating transfers to your skin. And a 2014 study found the transfer isn’t fixed: when people held thermal paper with hand sanitizer still wet on their hands, far more of the chemical came off onto the skin than when their hands were dry. The sanitizer’s solvents opened the door. The researchers happened to note that at the store they looked at, a bottle of sanitizer sat at every register.

Under the nails:

• Nothing you can see — and that’s the whole story

That’s the strange part. The bottle at the register — the thing we all reached for and never stopped reaching for — may be the reason more of the coating ends up on a cashier’s hands, not less. There’s nothing to scrape out at the sink. Whatever’s there went somewhere a nail brush can’t reach.

Vermont law regulates bisphenols in food packaging. It says nothing about the coating on the paper you’re handed at the register.

That’s the piece nobody sees. Now the piece nobody counts.

Look back at that top-ten list and notice who isn’t on it — the logger, the farmer, the sugarmaker, the quarry hand. It’s tempting to read their absence as proof they’ve vanished from Vermont. They haven’t. The federal survey is built from employers’ payrolls, and much of Vermont’s iconic work is done by people who work for themselves — so the count can’t see them. It puts the entire category of farming, fishing, and forestry in Vermont at about 530 workers, a number that only makes sense once you know how much it leaves out. Those hands are real.

Under the nails:

• Sap, bar oil, chainsaw pitch

• Manure and teat dip

• Granite dust, of the kind Barre learned long ago to fear

It’s all still under Vermont’s fingernails. It just doesn’t fit in the ledger — which is its own quiet story about how we measure a state’s work, and whose work we measure.

So: what’s under yours?

Maybe it’s cardboard. Maybe it’s fryer grease, or floor stripper, or nothing at all because the day’s residue went somewhere you can’t see. Maybe it’s sap and chainsaw grit and you’re not in anyone’s official count. Whatever it is, it’s the truest record of your day you’re carrying — a small dark line that says here is what I actually did with my hands in a way a job title never quite manages.

Scrape it out. Wash up. Dinner’s ready.

Tell us what you found under there.