This is intentionally misleading (but in a typical, not uncommon way.) If you want to see if employment has expanded, you count hours, not employees. But, again, this is commonly done when a low unemployment/high employment rate is needed for press purposes - it's the reason why U-3 is used in government press releases instead of U-6, which also includes part-time workers who want full time employment. This is not a universal standard - in Germany, for example, the distributed unemployment rates include do that category (and others.) Even worse, US media (NYT, WaPo) frequently compare nominal US and German rates as if they were measured in the same way.