In this article we investigate the influence of emotional labor on job satisfaction and burnout across a range of public service occupations. While prior studies in this genre have primarily focused on human services, occupations in this analysis range from routine clerical interactions to emotionally intense first-responder jobs. Despite this range, structural equation modeling shows that (a) emotion work increases job satisfaction as well as burnout; (b) emotive skills lead to an upsurge in job satisfaction and are inversely associated with burnout; and (c) the deleterious effect of emotional labor mainly occurs not with its performance, per se, but when workers must fake their feelings. It is this circumstance that produces an elevated risk of burnout.