Salary Negotation Post-Verbal Accept, Internal Hire

Question

I've read through most of the Q/A here about negotiating after accepting the verbal offer, which fall under a number of categories:

1)External hire, accepted verbal, no counteroffer, no leverage.

2)External hire, accepted verbal, counteroffer, potential leverage.

3)External hire, accepted verbal & written, no leverage.

In this situation, an internal hire (already working for company A, getting moved from a lower hourly position to a higher salaried position) accepted a verbal offer on the phone. The paperwork hasn't been signed yet, said person is to meet w/ the supervisor, then eventually sign the paperwork. Is there any leverage in negotiating the salary higher at this point? How would one go about this?

I'm going to add the situation is much like this one Should I negotiate a higher salary when transitioning from intern to full-time employee?

The problem being, females are historically offered lower starting pays than men (a real situation in company A), and at this point the worry is she's been locked into this lower base pay and won't get to the same level even with gender-neutral raises on performance. We have been made aware of this by a supervisor in a different department. In an effort to keep this question unbiased, I initially omitted this fact, but, in an effort to keep this question from being a duplicate of the above, there are motivations outside of simply wanting higher pay at work here.

Answer 1

In most companies with a defined salary structure the position will have a range of salaries that the company is willing to pay somebody for each position.

We have to assume that the work location, the team, and the position description are acceptable to the employee. We also have to assume that the benefit package for the new position is essentially unchanged. If these assumptions aren't true then negotiating the pay and benefits is a compactly different issue.

Assuming the current position isn't going away and the new position was advertised, then the employee should have already determined if the minimum salary advertised is acceptable. If there is overlap between the current salary and the band the new position pays, the employee has to decide what is minimum percentage increase they are willing to accept. Because this is an internal switch the salary for the new position would have been a question I would have asked during the interview. But since that wasn't already discussed that would be a question I would ask now. If it isn't acceptable, and you are willing to lose the new job, then don't sign and try to negotiate.

If the current position is going away, then you don't have a lot of leverage you will probably have to settle for the minimum of the band, or some small increase in salary if the bands overlap.