Business

With jobs harder to find, more people are working part time, workers 55 and older are holding on tight and not retiring and most minorities continue to have higher-than-average unemployment rates, according to the latest federal numbers.

The number of workers who are working part time in non-farm and farming jobs for economic reasons, sometimes called "involuntary part-time workers," grew by 645,000 across the country in October alone, says the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Those could be people who can't find full-time work or who formerly didn't work at all.

That number has grown by 2.3 million over the past year and now stands at about 6.7 million.

• Young people appear to be losing jobs faster than those 55 and older, says a recent analysis by the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Employment is still rising for those 55 and older, the center said. But employment of workers 35 to 44 fell by 2.6 percent in October, compared with a year earlier. And it fell by 2 percent for workers 20 to 24 and 1.5 percent for those 25 to 34.

• The unemployment rate for the country as a whole reached 6.5 percent in October, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said. But for adult men, the rate was 6.3; adult women, 5.3 percent; Whites, 5.9 percent, Hispanics, 8.8; Blacks, 11 percent; and Asians, 3.8 percent.

Excerpted from the blog of Betty Beard at azcentral.com/members/Blog/Economy.