By Will Lester
The Associated Press

WASHINGTON - Fresh concerns about U.S. jobs being shipped overseas are not being turned into renewed public sentiment to buy American, an Associated Press poll found.

Just over one-third say they regularly check labels to see if an item was made in the United States; older Americans are more likely to do so than those who are younger.

The debate over U.S. jobs lost overseas now focuses on white-collar service jobs, particularly in the areas of call centers and technical support. For several decades, however, manufacturing jobs were shipped overseas to countries with lower-wage workers, leading to campaigns to buy American-made products.

Slightly more than half of Americans, 54 percent, said they would buy a higher-priced U.S.-made product over a cheaper, foreign-made one, according to the poll conducted for the AP by Ipsos-Public Affairs. Forty percent said they would buy the lower-priced product made in another country.

"That's not a big deal to me, where it was made," said Serena Evans, a 24-year-old machine operator from Hurt, Va. "I look for the cheapest product, because I barely have the money to buy it."

Evans was typical of her age group.

Nearly two-thirds, 63 percent, of those younger than 30 said they seldom if ever check to see where a product is made - more than three times the number who do. A majority of young adults said they would buy a lower-priced product from another country over a more expensive U.S. one.

Older Americans, 60 and above, were almost twice as likely to say they usually or always check labels to see where a product is made. And by more than 2-to-1, they said they would buy an American product even if it cost more than lower-priced foreign goods.

"I'll pay more for an American product," said 81-year-old Sam Rucker, a retiree from Brady, Texas. "We should look out for ourselves. I've always felt that way."

If an American product and a similar foreign-made product were about the same price, an overwhelming majority of all age groups said they would buy American.

The new loss of jobs overseas, often described as "outsourcing," is not fundamentally different from the loss of blue-collar jobs in past years, said David Wyss, chief economist at Standard and Poor's.

"The only difference now is that it's white-collar workers and not blue-collar workers who are affected," said Wyss.

Just over two-thirds said they think sending jobs overseas hurts the U.S. economy. And almost that many said they think outsourcing is mostly caused by the greed of corporate executives, not by the necessity for companies to compete.

Frank Balawender, a 50-year-old mechanical engineer from Sharon, Pa., said he has seen the influence of outsourcing firsthand.

"We used a company for machinery drawings. They would get them done in India and send them back to us," Balawender said, noting that foreign competition has hurt his region of western Pennsylvania.

"Around here, there used to be a lot of heavy industry," he said. "Now there's no jobs except for low-paying service jobs."

The AP-Ipsos poll of 1,000 adults was taken May 17-19 and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.