STRIKING BRAZIL SEAMEN THREATEN MASS RESIGNATION Striking seamen said they would offer their collective resignation rather than end their 13-day-old national strike on management's terms. The seamen said they were spurred to their decision after marines occupied the ship Docemarte in Santos harbour Tuesday night. They said seamen on the vessel were being forced to work under duress. President Jose Sarney's government despatched troops to Brazil's ports and oil installations on Tuesday. Seamen in Santos, Brazil's main port, are in defiant mood. One of their leaders, Orlando dos Santos, told Reuters that most of the 1,100 seamen in the port offered their resignations on Wednesday. The national strike headquarters in Rio de Janeiro said seamen were offering to resign in all the country's main ports. The strike by 40,000 seamen comes as Brazil faces a serious debt crisis brought on by a sharp deterioration in its trade balance. The country needs all the foreign exchange it can get, and shipowners have been quick to denounce seamen for the harm the strike is doing to exports. An advertisement placed in the newspapers by the Shipowners Association read, "The seamen's strike is illegal, irrational and unpatriotic." The seamen respond that they cannot live on their present salaries. According to officical pay lists available in the union's office, the basic pay for ordinary seamen is 1,977 cruzados a month, while various allowances can bring their total pay up to 4,000 cruzados a month. At the other end of the scale, captains earn 7,993 cruzados a month basic pay, which is brought up to 15,229 cruzados with allowances. "Brazil's seamen are the second worst paid in the world, after Ghana's," dos Santos said. He said the seamen had not received a pay increase since February 1986, and prices have doubled since then with the collapse of the government's Cruzado Plan price freeze. Talks in Rio de Janeiro Wednesday involving Labour Minister Almir Pazzionotto, seamen and employers failed to resolve the dispute. The seamen are demanding pay raises of about 200 pct but have been offered less than half that.