For the last thirty years, New Public Management (NPM) has caused profound changes in the public services of many countries. If there is a important body of discourse on the human consequences of the organizational and managerial changes it has caused, the impact of these changes on suffering at work has not been measured empirically yet. Our research examines the impact of these developments on a specific form of suffering at work : burnout. We therefore present the results of a survey conducted among the employees of a French local authority linking the way these employees perceive NPM-related changes with indicators of intensification and suffering at work. The analysis, which was conducted on a sample de 1,118 public sector employees, indicates that NPM has an impact on burnout through its effect on both the workload as perceived by employees and the climate of emotional abuse.