You're welcome to go to the BLS statistics area and look at the numbers yourself. It's a good site, and you can make graphs if you want. The number of people employed in America shrunk in absolute numbers quite a few times during the 1970s, 1980s ,and 1990s.

There are 776,000 more people employed today than in January of 2001. The problem is that the number of workers has increased faster. By over 3 million, in fact. Of these, about 2.2 million didn't have jobs waiting for them. It's a bit odd to interpret this as jobs "lost," but I guess it makes more political hay if you can convince people that there are 2 million fewer jobs in America than there used to be.

So I'm not sure what the graph is using for the number "total employment."