Just to stirr the pot a bit. So let's say you are a good legit contractor. You are licensed, bonded, insured, and you pay all your worker's comp and other taxes. You work hard to provide a good service at a good price and you uphold a professional image in all your operations.
Then along comes some punks with a truck and a saw and they don't pay taxes because they work under the table. They underbid you because they pay none of the business fees, insurance and taxes that you pay. Their equipment is ****, and they have saved hundreds, if not thousands of dollars by not buying PPE for their workers. Meanwhile when one of them gets hurt on the job they just go to the emergency room and get treated and then leave and never pay the bill.
Next you find out the work they did is substandard and they damaged the trees that they were working on. The did improper cuts that peeled big hunks of bark down the trees and you now know that in 2-5 years the trees will be stressed enough that they will die. Yet, had you done the work the trees would have done just fine and not died from being trimmed.
As an honest hard working business man that has all the insurance/taxes/worker's comp etc paid up how does that make you feel?
I saw it all the time when I sold firewood. My wood was dry and had been cut and split for at least a full year. Yet hundreds of times in my career I would deliver to a house that had 1-3 cords of green as grass firewood sitting in the person's garage. They would buy the stuff from the yahoo with a truck and a saw that was backing up to an easy log and chopping it up and throwing it on the truck to sell it. No drying whatsoever, and cheap to a level I could not compete against. Meanwhile I was using ~$40K worth of equipment to get firewood from a real woods with water/bugs/mud/etc and sitting on my finished inventory of wood for a year so it was dry and ready to burn, safely, the moment it was delivered. Those yahoos with their trucks and their green wood pizzed me off big-time. Oh,and my dad made sure I had insurance in case I was hurt, and I was a few times. Firewooding is dangerous work.
I'm sorry but folks that do not follow the rules pizz me off. It is no different than drivers with cars that have no license, no registration and no insurance driving clunkers down the road. Being in business is no different. There are rules to protect everyone, they should be followed.