From Handshake to Contract
A look back at six decades of organizing, bargaining, and building a college — through the documents that survived in the archive boxes.
1962–1963: Before There Was a Union, There Was a College
Merced Community College District was formed in May 1962, approved by Merced County voters 3,996 to 1,494. The first Board of Trustees — Buddy Iwata (Chairman), George Clark (Vice-Chair), Byron Cunningham (Secretary), Don Robinson, and John Hann — hired Lowell F. Barker as the college's first president that same year.
By fall 1963, Merced College had over 20 full-time faculty. Salaries ranged from $5,250 (BA) to $10,763 (PhD with experience) — a 5% raise that year, which faculty member Hermon "Bud" Jones later called "more than anything else, in my opinion, a liberalizing effect on the community."
That fall, faculty organized the Faculty Senate, meeting for the first time on November 21, 1963. It had no bargaining power — it was purely advisory — but it planted the seed. Jones became its first president. In 1964, the Senate reorganized into the Faculty Association, the direct ancestor of today's MCFA, with John Caliguiri as its first president.
1976: The Union Gets Real — SB 160 and Exclusive Representation
For over a decade, the Faculty Association existed without formal bargaining rights. That changed with California's SB 160, the law that first extended collective bargaining to public school and community college employees.
Effective July 1, 1976, the Merced Community College District Board of Trustees formally recognized:
- Merced College Faculty Association, Chapter 770, CTA/NEA as the exclusive representative for all certificated employees (excluding the Superintendent/President, all Vice Presidents, Deans, Associate/Assistant Deans, and anyone employed less than 24 weeks a year)
- CSEA Chapter #274 as the exclusive representative for classified employees
This is arguably the union's real founding moment as a legal bargaining agent — seven years before the earliest signed contract that survives in the archive.
