Bur I would say "rising expectations" accompany rather than drive change. The roots of social movements are structural. They arise primarily in reaction to the absence of democratic rights in a society. When workers have been blocked from improving their conditions from within the system, they have agitated illegally and mostly mostly violently for these rights - in the first place, for for the right to vote and to form unions. They have frequently allied with peasants in the countryside seeking land reform. These democratic demands have been at the heart of the great class struggles of modern history, including the ones you cite above.
Where these channels have been opened under mass pressure - through the removal of property, racial, and gender restrictions on voting rights and the legalization of unions and collective bargaining - the working class has opted to fight for redistributive reforms rather than a fundamental transformation of existing power and property relations. This has described the state of mass politics in the developed capitalist sphere for more than a half century.
It's only when the system has broken down to the extent it can't meet popular demands for relief through the electoral system that the movement for reform spawns revolutionary tendencies, society becomes sharply polarized, and the ruling class reverts to repression - most recently in the 30s in the guise of fascism. The CIO, as you note, was the product of "rising expectations" coming out of the depths of the Great Depression, but it was also - and I'd say mainly - driven by the practical need for the right to form unions and to bargain collectively. When this objective was won through a combination of sit-down strikes and political legislation, expectations were largely satisfied rather than stimulated, and the left's influence in the unions correspondingly waned rather than grew.
Although Marxists acknowledge capitalism's success in recovering from economic crisis, I don't think they've given sufficient credit to its political shock absorber - the effect that the extension of democratic rights has had on the possiilities for socialist revolution. The stubborn confidence in electoral politics by the working class indicates that it's not simply a matter of the masses being "held back" by union and party bureaucrats or temporarily suffering from a bout of "false consciousness".
Certainly, Marx and Engels did not anticipate that capitalism would continue to expand into the 21st century. Their theory was forged in the fires of the 1848 revolutions in Europe, the Chartist movement in England, and the militant rise of the industrial working class, all of whose struggles turned on the demands for universal male suffrage and the right to form unions and other democratic organizations. Although selective quotes can probably be culled from obscure sources hinting otherwise, the early Marxists did not entertain that capitalism could meet the most basic demands of the workers and instead expected increasing immiseration and class struggle to result in imminent crisis and socialist revolution. That didn't happen, but they at least lived in a period which lent their projections - and the political strategies which flowed from them - a certain credibility. We no longer live in such a period, which is not to say, given capitalism's tendency towards crisis, one could not recur.