In Guatemala's cities, newly-enfranchised labor unions accompanied reformist labor laws that greatly benefitted the urban lower and middle classes. Several parties and trade unions were formed. The enfranchisement of a large proportion of the population was a significant legacy of his term. The benefits did not spread to the rural agrarian areas where hacendado traditions, termed "latifundia", remained patrician, racist, unyielding, and harsh. Whilst the government made some effort to improve "campesino" peasants' civil rights, rural conditions in Guatemala could not be improved without large-scale agrarian reform, proposed as mediated and fairly compensated land redistribution. Failure in achieving that was a weakness for Arévalo's party in Congress and thus for his administration, which his successor attempted to confront and to remedy with Decree 900.