Charles S. "Sasha" Zimmerman (November 27, 1897 – June 3, 1983) was a Ukrainian-American socialist activist and trade union leader, who was an associate of Jay Lovestone.

[2] At the age of 12, Sasha began transcribing communiques to help a young man he knew who was connected with the revolutionary movement in Odessa and Kiev.

Zimmerman first went to work as a retail clerk in a store near his apartment, but the hours of employment made it impossible for the boy to attend night school.

[5] Charles quit and took a job in the burgeoning New York garment industry making knee-pants, a position which allowed him to continue his studies in the evening.

He was taken to work by his uncle, a factory foreman in Astoria, where he was taught carpentry, a job which netted him just $5.80 per week after car fare was paid.

[9] Zimmerman was three times a candidate for elective political office, running in Bronx County for New York State Assembly in 1925, 1926, and 1928 on the ticket of the Workers (Communist) Party.

[13] Zimmerman joined with Lovestone in establishing the Communist Party (Majority Group), an organization which underwent a series of name changes before eventually emerging as the Independent Labor League of America in the late 1930s.

Zimmerman was a bitter critic of the National Recovery Act of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the period, regarding it in particular and the New Deal in general as "a Fascist idea," and he was outspoken in holding the view, saying as much to a convention of the ILGWU.

[16] In the middle 1930s, with the ultra-radical "Third Period" at an end in favor of the coalition-building of the "Popular Front," the official Communists were persuaded to drop their dual union activities and to rejoin the ILGWU.

In January 1939 he sent a telegram to William Green, president of the American Federation of Labor, accusing "conservative forces in Congress" of "organizing to prevent enactment of new social legislation" and of acting "to worsen the unemployment situation by cutting down WPA appropriations."

Zimmerman called for a national conference bringing together representatives of the AFL, the CIO, and the railway brotherhoods as a means of establishing "united labor action" to defend the Rooseveltian policies.

Early in 1946, Zimmerman was dispatched to Europe on behalf of the Jewish Labor Committee to make a survey of the political situation on the ground there.

[22] Zimmerman was particularly concerned that in the zone of divided Germany controlled by the Soviet Union, Communist unionists were receiving five times the amount of newsprint allotted to the Socialists, thus making them far better able to advance their views.