@BigZ
I skimmed through some of this thread after your initial post and much information has been posted but I thought I'd add a reply of my own as I did work in two different committees at one airline I spent about seven years flying for.
Hotel Committee was one. It was a light workload type thing and we mostly got things done by communicating via group e-mails. There was a very occasional meeting with the company about things but more often than not, just one of the four of us could go. The hotel committee work was not enjoyable and barely effective, but that was mainly due to the fact that, like many fee-for-departure airlines, the company person who we worked with was stubborn and had little options on their end on top of that.
There was an instance where we found a downtown hotel location at one city that was actually cheaper than where we stayed at the airport, and everyone wanted to stay downtown for the 30 hour layovers. Despite having found a cheaper downtown option, the company refused to consider it out of spite.
So, the hotel committee work, I did not because it was enjoyable, but because I wanted to partake in the continual effort against the company to erode the quality of overnight stays to save an amount of money per layover that would equate to running an APU for two minutes.
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Most of what I did in committee volunteering was in the realm of safety. I first got started with that as an intern for the airline that, in the eyes of the FAA, had what was generally regarded as the best safety reporting system, best FOQA program, and best set of standard operating procedures of the major airlines. It was a learning experience to say the least, to read 10-15 ASAP reports daily as they came in, for months on end, and sit through the weekly meetings where the discussion of those reports took place. At the time I thought it would be nice to someday get involved in a similar manner.
I mention the above because there have been several posts in this thread that mentioned it can be tough to get involved in the safety stuff because 'everyone' wants to do that too. I'm not sure how you could differentiate your profile a bit from the rest of the crowd, but if there is a way to do so, then it might help as far as getting involved in safety work.
I worked on the ASAP Event Review Committee for a few years which was generally 1-2 meetings per month, done as a two-day on my line, fly up the night before, and fly home after meeting day. We had three ALPA ERC reps so we took turns doing meetings and it was very flexible with vacations and other stuff -- there was always someone else to do the work if I was going to be out of town for a while. Not so with all committee work.
Later on I became Central Air Safety Chairman of the safety committee which had its challenges but after being immersed in the safety stuff for long enough, wasn't too daunting a task particularly as the airline was fairly small. There's lots of resources from ALPA at a national level, and every six months a lot of information sharing as far as how programs are run and what issues each airline was running into. That took place in DC with all of the airline safety reps attending. As BobDDuck mentioned back near the beginning of this discussion, CASC and some other safety positions aren't the type that will be openly advertised because they will likely be filled with someone who has already been doing safety work. But there are plenty of ways to break in to that side of things, like being a local safety rep at your base etc.
