Not as far as I know. There are however several workarounds:
If you have only one set of layers to process, you can set the "chainlink" indicator (and retrieve it with layer.linked
or the PDB equivalent).
If you need to distinguish several sets of layers there are several possibilities:
Layer groups
Put the layers in layer groups (one for each processing) and iterate the children of each group.
Color tags
Set different color tags on the layers (this can be retrieved with pdb.gimp_item_get_color_tag(item)
). The good side of the technique is that color tags can be set (and checked) with the UI, and won't have side effects like groups.

"Parasites"
Parasite are named values that you can add to Gimp items. You can attach parasite to layers:
# attach:
parasite=gimp.Parasite('<name>','<value>)
layer.parasite_attach(parasite)
# retrieve:
parasite=layer.parasite_find('<name>')
value=parasite.data
# remove:
layer.parasite_detach('<name>')
This would require a side script (for instance, one that copies the initial layer names to parasites) but the processing becomes completely independent from the name.