I think it was mentioned before, in many states by law, the employees of electrical contractors must be on their payroll, no 1099's allowed. Your state may be different.
satcom, i think you are confusing 1099 for employees versus 1099 for companies.
I moved to DE from NJ and I have insight on how NJ works.
Here, in DE, I could not 1099 someone doing Electrical work under me, unless they had their own Electrical License and Insurance, etc. If they didn't have those required items, I would have to pay them as payroll employees. (in NJ it is not allowed, they MUST be paid as payroll employees, according to you)
But, as an Electrical Contractor, when we work for GC's, we submit a proposal, yada yada, we send them an invoice and they pay us. At tax time, they send us a 1099. it is just a form that they will file to show who they paid, how much money too.
We work in Multiple States, and they are all the same, because this is a Federal Tax Form.
In actuallity, there are numerous GC's that never send us 1099's. We still have to report their payments as income.
Any materials, or any other business deductions are accounted for.
If we didn't report their payments as income, even without a 1099, we could get into trouble with the IRS.